The desk
Reporting and analysis from the Softwr desk on acquisitions, shutdowns, price rises and retirement dates, plus buying guides, every checkable claim sourced.
Chrome finished removing Manifest V2 in 2025, and userscript managers were hit harder than any other category of extension, because running code a user supplies is precisely what MV3 was written to restrict. Both Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey survived it. What changed is that Chrome now requires the reader to flip a switch before either one can do its job, and the switch has moved twice.
Three of the best known names in ship tracking belong to the same company. Kpler acquired MarineTraffic and FleetMon in 2023, and the effect on a buyer in 2026 is that a comparison which looks like three quotes is often one vendor quoting three ways. This is what each platform is actually for, what the published coverage figures mean, and where the genuinely independent options remain.
Software spend rose nearly 8% in a year while the number of applications stayed flat, which means the same portfolio now costs considerably more. The mechanism is not inflation and it is not seat growth. It is the AI-enhanced tier that arrives at renewal as the only tier still being sold, and September 2026 gave buyers three dated examples of how the pattern works.
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra on 3 September 2026 at $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output, exactly 2.5 times GPT-5.6 Sol on both. The headline is not the part that will surprise a finance team. A request that crosses 272,000 input tokens is re-rated at double the input price and 1.5 times the output price, and the surcharge applies to the entire request rather than the excess.
Atlassian announced on 1 September that three usage meters begin billing on 3 December 2026: Rovo credits, automation steps and AI agent resolutions. The allowances sound generous until you divide them by what an interaction costs. Jira Standard includes 25 Rovo credits per user per month and a basic Rovo event consumes 10, which is two and a half questions per person before the meter starts.
Cursor announced on 14 August 2026 that it has been acquired by SpaceX. An AI editor is a strange thing for a rocket company to own, and the risk for teams using it is not the one most people are naming.
On 26 August 2026 the creators of DuckDB announced DuckLabs will join AWS as a subsidiary. They say the licence, roadmap and governance do not change. Here is what the announcement actually commits to, and the questions it leaves open.
Every office suite spent 2026 adding AI. LibreOffice 26.8 shipped without it and put that in the release notes, alongside typography and OOXML chart fixes. For some buyers the absence is the product.
Amazon RDS stopped supporting MySQL 8.0 under standard terms on 31 July 2026, and started charging for Extended Support on 1 August. Nobody has to opt in: enrolment is automatic, the database keeps running exactly as it did, and the only visible change is on the bill. The price rises again in 2028. Here are the dates from AWS own release calendar, what the charge actually buys, and the one setting that ends it.
From 1 October, paying for an annual Microsoft software subscription in monthly instalments costs 5% more than paying for it up front. It applies to SQL Server, Windows Server, Client Access Licenses and System Center bought through a partner. It does not arrive on 1 October for most people, which is the part worth understanding: it arrives at your renewal, and every organisation has a different one.
A price rise is visible. A plan retirement is not: the number on your invoice stays the same until the day it does not. Clay migrates you the moment you change anything. Z.AI cancelled auto-renew outright. Atlassian has put a date on when Data Center licences stop working entirely. Four vendors, four different mechanisms, quoted from their own notices, plus how to find out whether you are on a plan that no longer exists and what to do about it.
While rechecking pricing pages across the Softwr catalogue, one pattern turned up often enough to be worth reporting on its own: vendors publishing a rate they have already told you is temporary. Not hidden, not deceptive, just quietly stated on the page nobody reads twice. Here are the ones with a date attached, what each reverts to, and how to check your own.
Microsoft has stacked an unusual amount of retirement onto a single date. On 13 October 2026 the entire Office 2021 family retires, Office LTSC 2021 reaches end of support, Publisher goes with it, Windows 11 version 24H2 ends servicing for Home and Pro, and the third and final year of Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2012 runs out. Here is the complete list, taken from Microsoft’s own lifecycle tables, along with one widely repeated claim about that date that is wrong.
The support software market has quietly stopped selling seats. Fin publishes $0.99 per outcome, Zendesk $1.50 per resolution on a commitment or $2.00 pay as you go, and Salesforce Agentforce $2.00 per conversation. Those numbers look comparable and are not, because conversation, resolution and outcome are three different units and only one of them means the software worked.
Software equities have had a violent 2026. The sector ETF fell more than 21% in the first quarter, Salesforce is down around 30%, Workday around 33%, and roughly $2 trillion of market value has gone. Every word written about it has been written for investors. This is written for the person whose team runs on one of these tools and wants to know what a repriced vendor does next.
Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq in July 2026 and has said it intends to make around a thousand more acquisitions. It already owns Evernote, WeTransfer, Vimeo, Meetup, StreamYard, Harvest, Komoot, Brightcove, Issuu, AOL, Eventbrite and, pending completion, Airtable. Its post-acquisition pattern is consistent enough to describe, and it is the single most useful thing a user of any of those products can know.
OpenAI shut the Sora app in April and switches the API off on 24 September. Foundry stopped developing Modo after seventeen years. Microsoft retired Teams live events in June. Alongside the well-covered closures, rechecking 2,898 products against their vendors’ own pages turned up a set of quieter ones. This is the list, with what each vendor said and where they said it.
Almost every wrong purchase in this category comes from one confusion. Calendly, Cal.com and SavvyCal exist to let other people take your time. Motion, Reclaim and the new Copilot scheduling agent exist to stop them. They look alike, they sit on the same Google Calendar, and buying one when you needed the other is the most common mistake people make here. Clockwise, which was the best-known tool of the second kind, was shut down in March 2026, which makes getting the distinction right more urgent than it was.
Task trackers, work management platforms, issue trackers and docs-first tools get cross-shopped as if they were the same category. They are not, and per-seat pricing means choosing wrong gets more expensive every time you hire. This guide sorts the four types, prices them as of August 2026, and works through the comparisons people actually search for.
In the first eight months of 2026, Airtable agreed to be bought by Bending Spoons, Salesforce agreed to buy Intercom, Autodesk closed on MaintainX and Thoma Bravo completed a twelve billion dollar take-private of Dayforce. Coverage of these deals is written for shareholders. This one is written for the person who has four years of work inside the tool being sold, and wants to know what happens next.
Almost every weather app starts from the same handful of numerical models. What separates them is which model they trust, how they correct it, how hard they monetise the free tier, and whether they will tell you where the number came from. This is what that means when you are choosing one.
Chrome finished removing Manifest V2 in 2026, and that single platform decision reshuffled the whole category. The extension that was the default recommendation for a decade no longer runs there at all. Here is what changed technically, what still works, and why the right answer now depends on which browser you opened this page in.
A dark mode extension is not a colour swap. It rewrites a site's stylesheet as the page loads, and the popular ones differ in how they do that. Which technique an extension uses determines what breaks, how much memory it costs you, and whether the paid option is worth anything at all.
Every guide takes one category, tests the claims its makers publish, and says which tool suits which person. The section headings below are the questions each one answers.
Chrome finished removing Manifest V2 in 2025, and userscript managers were hit harder than any other category of extension, because running code a user supplies is precisely what MV3 was written to restrict. Both Tampermonkey and Violentmonkey survived it. What changed is that Chrome now requires the reader to flip a switch before either one can do its job, and the switch has moved twice.
Three of the best known names in ship tracking belong to the same company. Kpler acquired MarineTraffic and FleetMon in 2023, and the effect on a buyer in 2026 is that a comparison which looks like three quotes is often one vendor quoting three ways. This is what each platform is actually for, what the published coverage figures mean, and where the genuinely independent options remain.
Almost every wrong purchase in this category comes from one confusion. Calendly, Cal.com and SavvyCal exist to let other people take your time. Motion, Reclaim and the new Copilot scheduling agent exist to stop them. They look alike, they sit on the same Google Calendar, and buying one when you needed the other is the most common mistake people make here. Clockwise, which was the best-known tool of the second kind, was shut down in March 2026, which makes getting the distinction right more urgent than it was.
Task trackers, work management platforms, issue trackers and docs-first tools get cross-shopped as if they were the same category. They are not, and per-seat pricing means choosing wrong gets more expensive every time you hire. This guide sorts the four types, prices them as of August 2026, and works through the comparisons people actually search for.
Almost every weather app starts from the same handful of numerical models. What separates them is which model they trust, how they correct it, how hard they monetise the free tier, and whether they will tell you where the number came from. This is what that means when you are choosing one.
Chrome finished removing Manifest V2 in 2026, and that single platform decision reshuffled the whole category. The extension that was the default recommendation for a decade no longer runs there at all. Here is what changed technically, what still works, and why the right answer now depends on which browser you opened this page in.
A dark mode extension is not a colour swap. It rewrites a site's stylesheet as the page loads, and the popular ones differ in how they do that. Which technique an extension uses determines what breaks, how much memory it costs you, and whether the paid option is worth anything at all.
If you already know the two tools you are weighing, the comparison pages answer faster than a guide will.
